No mention of Hoare triples, predicate transformers, loop invariants, or any of the other formal machinery that was discovered 50 years ago and thoroughly solves the problem. The author means well, but this is completely uninformative.
Dijkstra was trained as a Mathematical Engineer for example. Fact is, if astronomers had the mindset of most programmers, they'd call their field Telescope Science.
Dijkstra appears to have thought otherwise: "I worked at the time at the Department of Mathematics of the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and told at that conference that the official academic title our graduates earned was 'Mathematical Engineer', and most of the Americans began to laugh, because for them it sounded as a contradiction in terms, mathematics being sophisticated and unpractical, engineering being straightforward and practical."[1]
Before quibbling, note I said he was trained as a Mathematical Engineer, not that he had a degree in Mathematical Engineering.
Yes, and to a certain extent, you can study computation without a digital computer. Computation can be abstracted away from the devices that perform it. You can, for example, study Big O notation and theoretical computational complexity of algorithms without actually using a computer.
Dijkstra was trained as a Mathematical Engineer for example. Fact is, if astronomers had the mindset of most programmers, they'd call their field Telescope Science.